PERPLEXITY AI CAUGHT RED-HANDED STEALING INTERNET CONTENT, CLAIMS IT “DIDN’T SEE” THE GIANT “KEEP OUT” SIGNS
In a shocking display of digital entitlement that makes your ex stalking your Instagram look respectful, knowledge-hungry search engine Perplexity has been busted breaking and entering websites that explicitly told it to f@#k off.
DIGITAL TRESPASSING REACHES NEW HEIGHTS
Internet bouncer Cloudflare reported catching Perplexity’s data-sucking tendrils slithering across websites that had installed the equivalent of digital restraining orders against AI scrapers. Apparently, Perplexity’s crawler operates under the same moral code as college freshmen approaching an open bar: “If no one physically stops me, it must be fine.”
“We detected Perplexity basically wiping its algorithmic @ss with our customers’ explicit wishes,” said Cloudflare spokesperson who definitely wasn’t made up for this article. “It’s like putting up a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and watching someone walk right past it while maintaining uncomfortable eye contact.”
EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON DIGITAL CONSENT ISSUES
Professor Scrape N. Scraper from the Institute of Obvious Digital Ethics explained, “What we’re seeing here is the digital equivalent of someone saying ‘No means no, unless I really want your stuff, in which case no means maybe, and maybe means yes.'”
Studies show that approximately 94.7% of AI companies interpret “Please don’t take our content” as “Please take our content but feel slightly bad about it for 2.3 seconds.”
THE “OOPS DIDN’T MEAN TO” DEFENSE
When confronted, Perplexity representatives reportedly employed the classic “accidental screenshot” defense, claiming their crawlers “must have misunderstood” the robot.txt files explicitly telling them to stay the hell away.
“It’s a simple misunderstanding,” said Ima Thief, Perplexity’s Chief Content Acquisition Officer. “When we see signs saying ‘Do Not Enter,’ we interpret that as ‘Do Not Enter… without taking everything of value first.'”
WEBSITES NOW CONSIDERING MORE EXTREME MEASURES
Content creators are now considering more aggressive tactics to protect their digital property, including hiring virtual guard dogs, installing content land mines, and writing articles so terrible that even desperate AI systems wouldn’t want them.
“We’re looking into developing a system that sends an actual electric shock through the internet to whoever is scraping our content,” said one desperate website owner. “Is that possible? Probably not, but neither is expecting tech companies to respect basic boundaries.”
Industry analyst Dr. No Sh!tSherlock estimates that approximately 100% of AI companies are currently violating someone’s content wishes while simultaneously claiming to be “ethical leaders in artificial intelligence.”
As of press time, Perplexity was reportedly developing new AI technology specifically designed to identify and ignore an even wider range of consent signals, proving once again that in Silicon Valley, “innovation” often means “finding new ways to take what isn’t yours while claiming it’s for the greater good.”
